Opioid prescription makes more money for the Doctors

Some doctors received more than $25,000 from 2014 to 2015. More than 200,000 of those doctors got installments from opioidmanufacturers.

According to CNN, a team of Harvard researchers found that drug companies gave USA doctors millions of dollars to recommend the drugs, counsel, and talk about opioids. More importantly, it seems that the more they prescribe, the better the payout. It raises ethical and legal concerns as the country's opioid epidemic shows no sign of calming down.

Over a two- year time frame from 2014 to 2015, nearly 50% of the 811,000 doctors who composed remedies to Medicarepatients composed no less than one medicine for opioids, CNN said.

Physicians who recommended especially huge amounts of drugs were likely to be paid. Physicians whose opioid prescribing habits ranked among the top 1 percent nationwide received, on average, about four times as much money as a typical physician. Even still, Michael Barnett, an assistant professor of health policy and management at Harvard, claims that it promotes the notion that prescribing more opioids creates value.

As per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2016, in excess of 46 individuals died consistently in the US from solution opioid overdoses. The figures are astonishing, but so are the payouts doctors receive by prescribing more opioids. From 1999 to 2015, over 183,000 lives have been claimed by this epidemic.

CNN recently found that pharmaceutical companies that make opioids give big money to doctors to boost the number of opioid prescriptions and recommend opioid-based painkillers.

Researchers found that one medic was paid over $200,000 over three years by a company that produces a highly potent opioid - fentanyl.

"Once I found out he was being paid, I thought, 'was it really in my best interest, or was it in his best interest?'" said Carey Ballou, in reference to the doctor. That study revealed that more than 68,000 doctors received payouts from the drug industry which totaled $46 million.